Building End-to-End Digital Onboarding Workflows Using Low-code

On average, organizations admit they have identified around three major time wasters inside their companies:

1. Inefficiencies in business processes (3 or more) that could be automated;
2. Poor communication;
3. Around 8 hours per week are spent on administrative tasks over strategic work (based on a survey taken by nearly 300 managers and directors across various industries). 

Any manager will admit that workflow automation tools could easily eliminate all of these and instead they could gain valuable time to focus on the big picture. But from wanting to adopt such a solution, to actually implementing it, decision-makers get stuck in the process due to lack of time to implement the technology, in spite of them claiming to love it.

And this observation comes from us at Plant an App, too, a low-code platform where the amount of coding is considerably minimized, while the environment itself relies mostly on a visual way of building apps. 

So where should any manager, CEO or in general a key decision-maker should start with  building end-to-end digital onboarding workflows? With two essential questions:

1. Who are you onboarding? 

Are you onboarding all your employees? Maybe clients, partners? Or a combination of these? Define them. 

2. Why are you doing digital onboarding? 

What do you want to obtain? Have in mind the final result, the outcome, then go back and break it down into smaller steps.

Having these two questions answered, here are some aspects you should keep in mind when considering digital onboarding workflows: 

• Start small, but keep it simple
  No need to go for complex workflows right from the start, keep it as simple as possible. The aim is to reduce churn, errors, repetitive tasks, so list all of these and take them one by one. 
• Significantly decrease the flow of paper
  In itself automation means less manual work. If you’ll keep having the same flow of paper, you haven’t done any major change, go a couple of steps back and see first what needs to be decreased or completely eliminated when it comes to this aspect before you move on. 
• Apply business rules with more assertiveness
• Accelerate processes and reduce the time between tasks
• Eliminate errors, inefficiencies
• Define indicators and get consolidated reports
• Integrate databases and monitor in real time
  Without measuring, there can’t be progress, monitor everything right from the start. 

How exactly does a digital onboarding workflow work using low-code?

To make this more applicable, we’ll use our low-code platform, Plant an App  as an example. Before you move on to the actual creation of onboarding workflows, we’ll ask you to add all your information on our partners page. Immediately after that you’ll get two emails: a partner request and a NDA to be digitally signed by you (you can still correct your information in this step, yoo) plus we’ll ask you to book a meeting. 

When you’re done with this step, you’ll gain access to Plant and App Partners, which essentially is your lab for onboarding workflows. Here you can see and manage all your activities, partners, contacts and documents. 

We’ll ask you to start by adding all your contacts and your partners’ role. In this webinar guided by Reza G., in charge with Strategic Delivery at Plant an App, you’ll see exactly how to set up these step by step. 

One you’ve added this information, it’s time to move on to the actual workflows. What exactly do you want to eliminate, automate or reduce and what’s the persona you have in mind for each one of these? For eg. maybe you want to put in place a workflow that automatically generates an NDA or you want to have an SMS sent to a client after a certain action. 

Is it a recurring payment? From simple to complex workflows (like signing an NDA) there’s no limit. For eg. in the webinar, Reza takes you through a ‘’Request NDA’’ workflow creation to see how easy it is. 

Starting with minute 47:00 you can follow the whole process step by step. This is an example of a more complex workflow; initially it starts with a simple one, but then it's split into two different end goals. 

Curious if anyone started building onboarding workflows using low-code and how the process went!

Previously published at https://www.plantanapp.com/blog/article/How-to-Build-End-to-End-Digital-Onboarding-Workflows-with-Low-Code